


What We Believe is Truth

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency!
Genre: M/M, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-26 13:59:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/966749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-ep/coda to The Nuisance - Johnny and his visitors in the hospital, and Roy most of all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What We Believe is Truth

Johnny is never really sure who the first one of the guys to see him actually was. He has vague, hazy recollections - the images in his head of waking from surgery like he was half-drowned, the world all sideways and syrupy, feeling sick to his stomach. 

He thinks it was probably Cap, though it could've been Roy. He believes it was Roy, that steadfast part of him that believes beyond all rational knowing that his partner would never have left him alone in the hospital. It was the fear he remembered - not his own, lying on the pavement, dizzy with pain, pain the socked him from all angles and left him disoriented and damp-eyed - it was the fear in Roy's voice when he said his name. 

It was probably Cap who was there first. But he believes that it was Roy. 

He knows the next time he woke up - aching, but the world came clear to him, with all its white flourescent glare and pain, no longer in slick fragments, no longer half-dreams - it really was Roy, Roy who stood by the side of his bed, touching his arm, the one without the IV in it, his mouth parted and his eyes creased like he wanted to say something, but he didn't, but maybe he couldn't, that was alright, Johnny couldn't quite figure out how to make his brain connect to his mouth properly.

So they were the two of them, quiet for a while, and Roy's fingers on his arm (and the way the hair on his arm gleamed in the white lights, and the way his eyes said a lot of things and the way he bit his lip just so said even more) tied him down to consciousness for a while, and then Chet came barreling in with Cap and Marco and Mike and Chet was saying _I told you he was awake by now -_

And Roy huffed and patted his arm. There was a vase of flowers on his nighttable that said _from Joanne._

In the hospital, it was Cap who came most often, after Roy. That surprised him - 

"Don't you have to - " When his brain had finally found his mouth, "You know, work? Make sure Chet's not settin' the station on fire?"

"You got hit by a car," Hank has grumbled, but there was bright mischief in his eyes, there was a hint of the rookie, the faintest tint of the young man with more regard for his brothers than the manual. "There's a lot of paperwork for that. A _lot._ No way to do it all at the station." 

Sometimes Cap would sit with him, do his paperwork (though Johnny was not, by the end of things, too sure it was real or even necessary, but he was glad for the pretense), talk to him about nothing in particular. He and his wife had gone to the beach, the one north of the city. The one Johnny had told Mike about. And he and Mike had gone to the mountains, and Mike had fished but thank God not caught anything. 

McConnike stopped by once, even. That old bat Nurse Ratchett had swooped in not two minutes after he showed up, and all but dragged him out by his ear. He couldn't help laughing even if his belly hurt like a sonofabitch. He'd tell Cap about that one, he'd thought. Cap would like that. (He did like it, eyes bright again, trying not to smile.) 

Chet came rarely, relaying messages from the nursing staff in the ER. Relaying, occasionally, flowers. 

"You get so many flowers," he'd said, "people'd think you were having a funeral in here." He'd laughed but then he'd stopped, a hard pause, "Tell your girlfriends to bring their own flowers."

So that had been nice. That meant Chet was worried about him. Which was strange, but not bad, all things considered. When he got well, he knew, things would be back to normal. 

Mike and Marco never failed to bring him food. After three straight days of hospital sludge, they showed up with a thermos full of stew and homemade bread. Johnny could've kissed them both. 

Mike told him about all the doings at the station, the department. Told him when the police caught the driver. Drunk, but not hammered. Young. Caught him only after he wrapped his car around a telephone pole. It had to figure. He almost, automatically, asked if the kid was alright. It was what he would've done if C or B shift had responded to an accident. But the words stuck, when he remembered the dark, and the car, and the pain, and the stupid, small things like the cold, damp pavement on his skin and thinking he didn't want them to cut his turnouts off because that'd come out of his salary, and he was cold, and oh Christ it _hurt_ , how it hurt so bad the whole of the world felt inside out, and the only thing clear to him was Roy, leaning over him, asking him if he was okay. Asking him person to person, Roy to Johnny, and not medic to patient. Just at first. Caught himself and went all professional, but just at first, there was that fear, and he knew it.

It was there, too, when Roy visited him in the hospital. In the creases around his eyes and the tentative way he touched his arm, or his shoulder.

The day Mike and Marco brought him real food Roy came by with a package wrapped carefully in a page of the Sunday comics. 

"The kids thought you'd like it," Roy said. It was a toy fire engine, gleaming red metal and a pristine white ladder. Johnny set it among the small jungle of flowers and tilted the ladder up. 

"It's a whole lot better than flowers," Johnny said, cracking a smile at him. Hoping Roy would smile back. And he did. Just the corner of his mouth. 

Roy visited him every day. Twice, if possible. Batty old Nurse Ratchett kicked him out a few times, but ever-patient, he returned, didn't bring him flowers or crosswords or food, just brought himself and sat with him a while and they didn't talk much, but it was alright. It was like the nights they spent together, where Roy would stroke his hair in the dark and they'd fall asleep skin-to-skin. It was like those in-between times, when he would wake up and Roy would still be out cold with his arm heavy over his chest, and he didn't want to fall back asleep and he didn't want to get up he just wanted to grab hold of that moment in his teeth and not let go. 

It was more than a month - between both of them in the hospital, and Roy getting out and going back to work, and Johnny going outpatient with his leg and the pretty physical therapist who was clearly some kind of sadist - until they found themselves alone in Johnny's living room, watching the game, remnants of two pizzas and a six-pack and a quart of milk in front of them on the coffee table, Johnny's leg in a plastic-and-velcro brace propped up on the coffee table.

Neither of them was really watching the game. 

After a while Johnny moved closer until their shoulders touched, and Roy said, without looking at him - 

"I thought you were dead."

Johnny is struck dumb for a minute.

"I - just, for a minute, and it's the stupidest thing and I know it, but I saw that guy hit you and I saw you come down and I thought you were dead."

"I'm not."

"Just that minute."

Johnny remembered seeing Roy on the television at the fire, being carried out on a stretcher, and that sensation like something inside him was tearing, and he was going to throw up. _I thought you were dead._

He knows that fear.

"I'm not, Roy."

The shaky feeling in his heart isn't because he's tired, it's not the beer and it's not the recollection of pain, or the upside-down feeling of the world when he woke from surgery, it's the memory of Roy leaning over him, and the fear rasping in his voice when he said his name. 

Johnny scoots himself closer, and Roy folds his arm over his shoulders. Heavy arm, solid weight, familiar, steady. Roy's always the steady one. Johnny doesn't say a damn thing, doesn't have the words anyway, never stopped him before but it does now, on the couch with Roy and the scraps of dinner and not watching the stupid, stupid game. 

His truck, which Roy had brought him in the hospital, sits on the table, too. It gleams in the television light, the little flickers and flashes like eyes, or headlights, or ghosts. 

Johnny feels Roy's ribs against his. Feels his heart, and feels his breath. Roy's alive and so is he, and like the dark after sex, or the morning after a long shift, the beat of their hearts is all that matters here.


End file.
